Robert Schumann – Manfred Overture | Rockford Symphony Orchestra Tuesday, March 4th, 2014 by: Kelly Price Robert Schumann – Manfred Overture ROBERT SCHUMANN Overture to Manfred, Op. 115 Born June 8, 1810, Zwickau, Saxony, Germany. Died July 29, 1856, Endenich, near Bonn, Germany. Schumann wrote incidental music for Byron's Manfred in 1848 and 1849 and conducted the first performance of the overture on March 14, 1852, in Leipzig. The score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; four horns; three trumpets; three trombones; timpani; and strings. Performance time is approximately 13 minutes. Robert Schumann's father August was a respected publisher who made a tidy sum printing pocket editions of works by Goethe, Schiller, and Byron, among others. Like his father, Robert was shy and bookish as a boy; he grew up reading the classics and showed great interest in becoming a writer himself.

Although he occasionally worked for his father, Robert wanted to perform and compose music, so he was the only one of four brothers who ultimately abandoned the family business. Long after he had made a name for himself as a pianist, composer, and critic, Robert continued to read voraciously, often by dim, flickering candlelight at bedtime. The powerful effects of literature may even have contributed to his frequent sleepless nights a diary entry from 1829 reads "Bed-lecture: Manfred by Byron terrible night." Schumann always had a special-affection for the British writer, and in 1840 he set one of Byron's poems to music as part of the song cycle Myrthen. Years later Joseph von Wasielewski, Schumann's concertmaster in Düsseldorf, remembered that when the composer read aloud from Byron's Manfred "his voice suddenly failed him, tears started from his eyes, and he was so overcome that he could read no further." Two years before Robert and his wife Clara moved to Düsseldorf in 1850, Schumann composed incidental music for a production of Manfred.

He was thrilled and inspired by the challenge, commenting at the time that he had never before committed himself "with such love and outlay of force to any composition as to that of Manfred." Throughout his life Schumann identified with tragic literary figures, and he may have seen something of himself in Byron's tormented hero, who wanders the Alps contemplating suicide and seeking oblivion. (Byron began his dramatic poem in 1816, shortly after staying with the Shelleys in the Swiss Alps, where the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley was deep at work on Frankenstein.) Schumann wrote an overture and incidental music for fifteen scenes; he began work on August 5, 1848, the day after he finished his single, ill-fated opera Genoveva. Although it is often said that Schumann had no genuine theatrical talent and that he was inept at writing for orchestra, the powerful overture he composed for Manfred proves otherwise. From its quick curtain-raiser beginning (three rushed, off-beat chords), Schumann's overture is masterfully and economically scored and an unerringly paced musical drama. It immediately casts a spell, setting the scene for the action that will follow.

Schumann has composed a character sketch in dark, unsettled music that grows in passion and urgency, then slowly collapses in the final pages. This is a magnificent and satisfying piece of music on its own, though, like any effective overture it makes one eager to hear more. Notes by Phillip Huscher San Francisco Symphony - SCHUMANN: Overture to Byron’s Manfred, Opus 115 │ Symphony no. 3 in E-flat major, Opus 97, Rhenish Music Then and Now: Twentieth Century and Contemporary Schumann: Overture to Byron’s Manfred, Opus 115 │ Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, Opus 97, Rhenish Robert Schumann was born in Zwickau, Saxony (Germany), on June 8, 1810, and died in an insane asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, on July 29, 1856. He wrote music for Byron’s Manfredin 1848-49 and conducted the first performance of the overture at a Leipzig Gewandhaus concert on March 14, 1852.

The overture was first heard in the United States when Carl Bergmann conducted it at the City Assembly Rooms, New York, on April 27, 1856. The San Francisco Symphony first performed the work under the direction of Alfred Hertz in December 1921. The most recent performances, in February 2006, were conducted by Alan Gilbert. The score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, with four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, timpani, and strings. Performance time: about twelve minutes. Schumann composed his Symphony No. 3 between November 2 and December 9, 1850, conducting its premiere himself at Düsseldorf on February 6, 1851. It came to the United States ten years later, when Theodor Eisfeld led it at a New York Philharmonic concert on February 2, 1861. Henry Hadley conducted the first San Francisco Symphony performance in November 1914; the most recent performances were given under Michael Tilson Thomas’s direction in May 2010.

Schumann’s score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones (in the fourth and fifth movements only), timpani, and strings. Performance time: about thirty minutes. Manfred Overture Of English poets, only Shakespeare ever became more popular abroad than Byron, and Byron’s impact went beyond the literary world. His turbulent life, his death as a fighter in the cause of Greek independence, his singular and complicated sexual radiance, all made him a fascinating figure. That his death inspired one of the most rapturously lyric episodes in the Faust of the octogenarian Goethe tells its own story. “Byronic” became one of the great European adjectives. Byron began Manfred,a dramatic poem in three acts, in the summer of 1816 (he was then twenty-eight) and completed it in April 1817. In 1811he had met his half-sister, Augusta Leigh, for the first time since boyhood; it is generally believed that he was the father of the daughter she bore in 1814.

He had just extricated himself from an exhausting liaison with Lady Caroline Lamb, whose husband would, as Viscount Melbourne, be Queen Victoria’s first prime minister and her coach in queenship. From the frying pan Byron fell into the fire, that is to say into a disastrous, short-lived marriage to Lady Caroline’s cousin by marriage, Annabelle Milbanke, whose innocence turned out to be humorlessness and whose sensitivity was soon unmasked as priggish touchiness. The Byrons had a daughter—Ada Augusta—in December 1815.In January the new mother went to visit her parents; two weeks later her father sent word that she would not be returning. Rumors about Byron’s relations with Augusta Leigh flew everywhere, public adoration turned into public opprobrium. Humiliated, broke, above all enraged, Byron left England on April 25, 1816. He never returned. He headed up the Rhine into Switzerland, joined the Shelleys at their house near Geneva (the eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley was working on Frankenstein), and immediately found himself in an affair with Mary’s half-sister Claire, who bore him a third daughter, Allegra, in January 1817.

A walking tour through the Bernese Alps gave him the physical setting for Manfred,Gothic novels like Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto formed the literary background, and his own life provided the material. Manfred lives alone in an Alpine castle, tormented by guilt for “some half-maddening sin” that he does not name, but whose nature we can guess, especially when we know something about Byron himself: “—my blood! the pure warm stream / Which ran in the veins of my fathers, and in ours / When we were in our youth, and had one heart / And loved each other as we should not love. . . .” And later: “She was like me in lineaments—her eyes / Her hair, her features, all, to the very tone / Even of her voice, they said were like to mine; . . . / I loved her, and destroy’d her!” Manfred summons the spirits of the universe, but they cannot give him the oblivion he wants. He attempts suicide, but a hunter saves him. He calls the Witch of the Alps and with her help visits the underworld.

There he encounters the shade of his sister, Astarte, who tells him only that “to-morrow ends thy earthly ills.” He refuses to acknowledge the power of the evil spirits through whom Astarte’s ghost was called up, both then and when they come for him on the morrow. He has also rejected the pleas of an abbot to repent. His last words, “Old man! ’tis not so difficult to die,” are spoken to the abbot as he expires. Schumann was one of the thousands whom Byron fascinated. The composer’s first biographer recalled hearing Schumann read aloud from Manfred:“His voice suddenly failed him, tears started from his eyes, and he was so overcome that he could read no further.” Had Schumann, himself such a museum of sexual neuroses, had any idea of what lay behind Byron’s poem he would have been too scandalized to touch it; as it was, he was ready to respond to its sense of overwhelming sorrow and its highly colored Romantic language.

He noted that never before had he devoted himself “with such love and outlay of force to any composition as to that of Manfred.” The incidental music for Manfred—and there is more than an hour’s worth of it—is some of Schumann’s most imaginative and intensely felt work. It is a mindlessly repeated commonplace that Schumann was no good at writing for orchestra, but the Manfred Overture is a marvelously imagined, superlatively accomplished piece of scoring—hear, for example, the economical and stunningly effective use of the trombones—with a characteristic sound all its own. Three agitated chords, rhythmically notated so as to generate maximum tension in performance, compel our attention to a dark and winding introduction. Gradually this becomes an impassioned, broadly laid out quick movement. This in turn falls back to the tempo and mood of the opening, the pacing of this retransition being accomplished with complete mastery. Schumann even asks that the rest following the last chord be extended—so that even the final silence is, so to speak, composed in. Symphony No.

3, Rhenish More than a natural phenomenon, the Rhine has been a political object and the cradle of legend and poetry, and, though it rises in Switzerland and drains into the North Sea in the Netherlands, the Germans have always thought of the river as their own. Schumann and the Rhineland were new to each other in 1850. Except for a period of study at Heidelberg, a winter in Vienna, and occasional travels with his wife, Clara, he had lived in his native Saxony all his life. When his friend Ferdinand Hiller left his conducting post in Düsseldorf, he proposed Schumann as his successor. On March 31, 1850, Schumann formally accepted his appointment as Düsseldorf’s Municipal Music Director. When he arrived that September, he had much to look forward to. The Düsseldorfers did everything they could to make their new music director feel welcome, unleashing an exhausting round of speeches, serenades, celebratory concerts, banquets, and balls. Robert’s creative energies were not to be suppressed, and in just fifteen October days he composed his Cello Concerto. The day he finished it he conducted the first of his ten subscription concerts.

But the Düsseldorf venture would quickly turn into disaster. Clearly unequal to the requirements of his position, Schumann was asked to resign in October 1852. The matter was smoothed over for the moment, but a year later he had conducted his last concert. Always subject to depressions and the survivor of more than one suicide attempt, Schumann threw himself into the Rhine on February 27, 1854, being rescued and committed into Dr. Richarz’s hospital at Endenich, where he died two and a half years later. But all that is another story. The Rhenish Symphony, which Schumann composed between November 2 and December 9, 1850, reflects his optimism in the face of new challenges and a fresh start among a people more outgoing than any he had known and whose ebullience de­lighted him. Schumann begins with one of his most glorious themes, a forward-thrusting idea, part of whose energy is in its artful cross rhythm. The tension generated at the outset pervades the entire movement, and the opening theme itself is never absent for long.

The spirit of the movement, characterized by minimal contrast and relaxation, is signature Schumann, as is the highly individual touch of introducing new material at the end. The Scherzo is an agreeably galumphing country dance, with a secondary idea shared by the main part of the movement and its rather brooding trio. “Morning on the Rhine” was Schumann’s original title for the Scherzo. The pace relaxes still more for the next piece. It is not really a slow movement, but something more by way of a middle-tempo intermezzo, an original genre with Schumann. Then comes the symphony’s first truly slow music. In September 1850, the Schumanns made the thirty-mile trip to Cologne to witness the installation of Cardinal Archbishop von Geissel in the cathedral. Schumann was stunned by this, the largest Gothic building in northern Europe, and he was excited by the splendor of the ceremony. The fourth movement of the Rhenish Symphony is his musical monument to a building that was almost as much a national totem as the river by which it stands. He reserves the sound of trombones for this tone picture and (with effective restraint) for the finale.

This fifth movement begins by being uncomplicatedly cheery; only gradually does it reveal itself as a kind of extension or completion of the cathedral section. As it moves to its brilliant close, it makes allusion as well to the symphony’s opening. —Michael Steinberg Michael Steinberg, the San Francisco Symphony’s program annotator from 1979 to 1999 and a contributing writer to our program book until his death in 2009, was one of the nation’s pre-eminent writers on music. We are privileged to continue publishing his program notes. His books are available at the Symphony Store in Davies Symphony Hall.

More About the Music Recordings: For the Overture—Rafael Kubelík and the Berlin Philharmonic (DG Double) | George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra (Sony Classical Masterworks) | Christian Thielemann and the Philharmonia Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon) For the Symphony—Marek Janowski conducting the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic (ASV) | Leonard Bernstein conducting the Vienna Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon) | Christoph Eschenbach conducting the Bamberg Symphony (Virgin) | Rafael Kubelík with the Berlin Philharmonic (Deutsche Grammophon) | Wolfgang Sawallisch with the Dresden Staatskapelle (EMI Great Recordings of the Century) Reading: Robert Schumann: Herald of a “New Poetic Age,” by John Daverio (Oxford) | Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius, by Peter Ostwald (Northeastern) | Robert Schumann,by Ronald Taylor (Granada) | Schumann in the Master Musicians series, by Eric Frederick Jensen (Oxford) | Get to know Schumann through his own words in Robert Schumann on Music and Musicians, edited by Konrad Wolff and translated by

 Paul Rosenfeld (Norton).

San Francisco Symphony Robert Schumann | German composer | Britannica.com Robert Schumann Alternative Title: Robert Alexander Schumann Robert Schumann Carl Maria von Weber Robert Schumann, in full Robert Alexander Schumann (born June 8, 1810, Zwickau , Saxony [now in Germany]—died July 29, 1856, Endenich, near Bonn , Prussia [Germany]), German Romantic composer renowned particularly for his piano music , songs (lieder), and orchestral music. Many of his best-known piano pieces were written for his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann. Robert Schumann. © Photos.com/Thinkstock The early years Schumann’s father was a bookseller and publisher. After four years at a private school, the boy entered the Zwickau Gymnasium (high school) in 1820 and remained there for eight years. He began his musical education at the age of six, studying the piano. In 1827 he came under the musical influence of the Austrian composer Franz Schubert and the literary influence of the German poet Jean Paul Richter , and in the same year he composed some songs.

In 1828 Schumann left school and, under family pressure, reluctantly entered the University of Leipzig as a law student. But at Leipzig his time was devoted not to the law but to song composition , improvisation at the piano, and attempts to write novels. For a few months he studied the piano seriously with a celebrated teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and thus got to know Wieck’s nine-year-old daughter Clara, a brilliant pianist who was just then beginning a successful concert career. In the summer of 1829 he left Leipzig for Heidelberg . There he composed waltzes in the style of Franz Schubert, afterward used in his piano cycle Papillons (Opus 2; 1829–31), and practiced industriously with a view to abandoning law and becoming a virtuoso pianist—with the result that his mother agreed to allow him to return to Leipzig in October 1830 to study for a trial period with Wieck, who thought highly of his talent but doubted his stability and capacity for hard work. Schumann’s Opus 1, the Abegg Variations for piano, was published in 1831.

An accident to one of the fingers of his right hand, which put an end to his hopes of a career as a virtuoso, was perhaps not an unmitigated misfortune, since it confined him to composition. For Schumann, this was a period of prolific composition in piano pieces, which were published either at once or, in revised forms, later. Among them were the piano cycles Papillons and Carnaval (composed 1833–35) and the Études symphoniques (1834–37; Symphonic Studies), another work consisting of a set of variations. In 1834 Schumann had become engaged to Ernestine von Fricken, but long before the engagement was formally broken off (Jan. 1, 1836) he had fallen in love with the then 16-year-old Clara Wieck. Clara returned his kisses but obeyed her father when he ordered her to break off the relationship.

Schumann found himself abandoned for 16 months, during which he wrote the great Fantasy in C Major for piano and edited the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik ( New Journal for Music ), a periodical that he had helped to found in 1834 and of which he had been editor since early 1835. In 1837 Schumann formally asked Clara’s father for permission to marry her, but Wieck evaded his request. The couple were finally married in 1840 after Schumann had gone to court to set aside Wieck’s legal objection to the marriage. Robert and Clara Schumann, lithograph by J. Hofelich The Bettmann Archive Dinosaur Eggs May Have Taken Six Months or More to Hatch Schumann had by now entered upon one of his most fertile creative periods, producing a series of imaginative works for piano.

Among these are the Davidsbündlertänze (composed 1837), Phantasiestücke (1837), Kinderszenen (1838; Scenes from Childhood), Kreisleriana (1838), Arabeske (1838), Humoreske (1838), Novelletten (1838), and Faschingsschwank aus Wien (1839–40; Carnival Jest from Vienna). Schumann wrote most of Faschingsschwank while on a visit to Vienna , during which he unearthed a number of manuscripts by Franz Schubert, including that of the Symphony in C Major (The Great).

In 1840 Schumann returned to a field he had neglected for nearly 12 years, that of the solo song; in the space of 11 months (February–December 1840) he composed nearly all the songs on which much of his reputation rests: the cycles Myrthen (Myrtles), the two Liederkreise (Song-Cycles) on texts by Heinrich Heine and Joseph Eichendorff, Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love) and Frauenliebe und Leben (Woman’s Love and Life), and many separate songs. Music: Fact or Fiction? Clara had been pressing him to widen his scope, to launch out in other media—above all, the orchestra . Now in January–February 1841 he composed the Symphony No.

1 in B-flat Major, which was immediately performed under the composer Felix Mendelssohn at Leipzig; an Overture, Scherzo, and Finale (April–May); a Phantasie for piano and orchestra (May), which was expanded into the famous Piano Concerto in A Minor by the addition of two more movements in 1845; another symphony , in D minor (June–September); and sketches for an uncompleted third symphony, in C minor. After this the orchestral impulse was temporarily spent. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies In another new departure, Schumann in 1842 wrote several chamber works, the finest being the Piano Quintet in E-flat Major. The year 1843 was marked by Schumann’s most ambitious work so far, a “secular oratorio,” Das Paradies und die Peri (Paradise and the Peri). He made his debut as a conductor—a role in which he was invariably ineffective—with its first performance in December of that year.

During Schumann’s work on The Peri, the newly founded Leipzig Conservatory had been opened with Mendelssohn as director and Schumann as professor of “piano playing, composition, and playing from score”; again he had embarked on activities for which he was unsuited. The first few months of 1844 were spent on a concert tour of Russia with Clara, which depressed Schumann by making him conscious of his inferior role. On returning to Leipzig he resigned the editorship of the Neue Zeitschrift. In the autumn of 1844 his work was interrupted by a serious nervous collapse. From late 1844 to 1850 he and Clara lived in Dresden, where his health was gradually restored. In 1845 he began another symphony, No. 2 in C Major, but because of aural nerve trouble nearly 10 months passed before the score was finished. Schumann wrote the incidental music to Lord Byron’s drama Manfred in 1848–49. Robert Schumann and Clara Schumann at the piano.

© Photos.com/Thinkstock Schumann’s attempts to obtain posts in Leipzig and Vienna had also been abortive, and in the end he accepted the post of municipal director of music at Düsseldorf . At first things went tolerably well; in 1850–51 he composed the Cello Concerto in A Minor and the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major (the Rhenish) and drastically rewrote the 10-year-old Symphony in D Minor, ultimately published as No. 4. He also conducted eight subscription concerts, but his shortcomings as a conductor became obvious, and in 1853 he lost his post as music director at Düsseldorf. Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest Schumann’s nervous constitution had never been strong. He had contemplated suicide on at least three occasions in the 1830s, and from the mid-1840s on he suffered periodic attacks of severe depression and nervous exhaustion. His musical powers had also declined by the late 1840s, though some of his works still display flashes of his former genius. By 1852 a general deterioration of his nervous system was becoming apparent. On Feb.

10, 1854, Schumann complained of a “very strong and painful” attack of the ear malady that had troubled him before; this was followed by aural hallucinations. On February 26 he asked to be taken to a lunatic asylum, and the next day he attempted suicide by drowning. On March 4 he was removed to a private asylum at Endenich, near Bonn, where he lived for nearly two and a half years, able to correspond for a time with Clara and his friends. He died there in 1856. Assessment As a composer Schumann was first and most naturally a miniaturist. Until after his marriage the great bulk of his work—including that by which he is best known—consisted of short piano pieces and songs, two genres so closely related in his case as to be hardly more than two facets of the same. The song accompaniments are often almost self-sufficient piano pieces, and the piano pieces often seem to have been melodically inspired by lyrical poems.

Even when the musical idea did not originate in literature but as a waltz, polonaise, or some other striking harmonic progression found at the piano by his improvising fingers, it was usually given a quasi-literary title or brought into relationship with some literary idea. Much of Schumann’s most characteristic work is introverted and tends to record precise moments and their moods. But another side of his complex personality is evident in the forthright approach and strongly rhythmic patterns of such works as the Toccata (1829–32) and the Piano Quintet. These two aspects are reflected in the two self-projections—the heroically aspiring Florestan and the dreamily introspective Eusebius—into which Schumann analyzed his own character and which he drew upon in an autobiographical novel, his critical writings, and much of his music. Trending Topics United States presidential election of 1860 Schumann’s early music—and much of the later—is full of enigmas , musical quotations (usually in subtle disguises), and veiled allusions .

In the field of the piano miniature and the pianistic song, he is a supreme master; in the simpler kind of lyrical inspiration and in the invention of musical aphorisms , he has seldom been surpassed. When Schumann embarked on more ambitious composition under Clara’s influence, his success was less assured. He was uncertain in writing for the orchestra and relied too often on safe routine procedures; his string writing was pianistic; and his most characteristic musical ideas, which he had hitherto been content to fit together in mosaics or remold plastically by variation, were seldom suited for development on a large scale. Nor in sustained musical thought did he find a satisfaction comparable with the smaller creations of his private dreamworld. Given such innate limitations, it is astonishing that Schumann was able to construct a symphony as firmly welded as the No. 4 in D Minor or a first movement as organic as that of the Symphony No. 3 in E-flat Major, and that he could conceive orchestral music of such gloomy power as the Manfred overture or the penultimate movement of the Symphony No. 3.

Some of his large-scale works, such as the Piano Concerto and the Piano Quintet, depend overmuch on the piano for their salvation, but the piano certainly saved them. Schumann did manage to create large musical forms that could communicate his own special brand of intimate poetry and unforced nobility. It was long customary to detect in the works of Schumann’s last years evidence of his approaching collapse. But he had been mentally unstable all his life, haunted by fears of insanity since the age of 18, and the change of style noticeable in the music of the early 1850s—the increasing angularity of his themes and complication of his harmony—may be attributed to other causes, including the influence of J.S. Bach. Schumann was rightly considered an advanced composer in his day, and he stands in the front rank of German Romantic musical figures. Even his critical writing, which is as fantastic, subjective, and lyrical as his early music, constitutes a valuable document of the trend and period. m00sicblob: Schumann: Manfred Overture, Op. 115 a 365 classical music blob.

Sunday, January 16, 2011 Schumann: Manfred Overture, Op. 115 here is the overture from schumann's incidental music to manfred, written in 1849, today one of schumann's most performed works. byron wrote his poem/drama manfred in 1816-1817, and it subsequently received tons of translations and ended up rather popular in germany (and elsewhere). it's the story of a guy named manfred who is guilty for an undisclosed reason regarding the death of his wife astarte. he summons spirits to try to forget, but they can't help him, so he goes on his merry way flaunting a lot of religious authority, ultimately killing himself and in so doing refusing to submit to the higher powers. schumann began writing a libretto for an incidental music suite in july 1848, began writing actual music in october, and had finished the overture by the end of the month. the overture was premiered before the rest of the music and generally got better response (then as now).

juuuust to give you an idea of what both the poem and the music were generally like, goethe defended his distaste of the writing by saying that the "gloomy intensity of a boundless, profound despair" was tiresome. the mildly hypochondriac mood of the whole piece was considered overwrought and outdated. three strong recordings. this piece has had a lot of musicological analyses done on it which try to tie it to robert schumann's mental/creative decline. for example: the tempo is marked "rasch" (rushed), and this can be seen programmatically - the insistent and pervasive syncopation from the very beginning (you might not know it from listening, but the three initial chords are syncopated) destabilize it. this of course can be related to the plot of the piece - those opening chords are representative of manfred's crime, his spiritual struggle, or his guilt - but historians have pointed to the prevalence of aggressive syncopation, triplets, and three against two as indicators of schumann's tumultuous mental state.

at any rate, this isn't a concert overture like the hebrides , but more of a character piece for what's to come, so i think it's alright to take a more programmatic view. the overture begins with a slow introduction, then speeds up to a sonata-form allegro. in nature it's been compared with some wagner, berlioz, and liszt (and i happen to think the motif at 4:00 sounds really wagnerian), but thematically it has been called the older relative of lots of brahms (check out the syncopation around 3:20). three wind/brass chords propel the piece into a development at 4:26. there is a recap that is more or less normal, but then the ending is subdued, and doesn't provide a conclusion but leads elsewhere. if you take it as a part of the whole, then maybe it leads to manfred sitting in his study, the opening of the play.

but if you take it as a sort of microcosm of the entire work/story, it's a darker-toned implication about the ending of the actual story (the actual incidental music ends in e major requiem, implying a redeemed manfred - this overture, if you read it this way, doesn't whitewash his death). there's a little cell of material which comes around every once in a while, starting with D-C#-G# (falling, quarter notes) around 2:39. clara schumann called this "astarte's theme," noting how it resurfaces every once in a while as a sort of second theme, then is quickly lost, dissipating almost immediately. you might see this as part of the story itself, and manfred's quest after her, in his guilt. ok, dark work today. stay tuned for something happier tomorrow! Posted by Manfred Overture, Op. 115 Manfred Overture, Op. 115 Detailed Description Orchestra, Score (Study Score) Composed by Robert Schumann. Eulenburg Taschenpartituren (Pocket Scores). Study Score. 72 pages. Eulenburg Edition #ETP646.

Published by Eulenburg Edition (HL.49010102). Item Number: HL.49010102 Detailed Description Orchestra, Score (Study Score) Composed by Robert Schumann. Eulenburg Taschenpartituren (Pocket Scores). Study Score. 72 pages. Eulenburg Edition #ETP646. Published by Eulenburg Edition (HL.49010102). Item Number: HL.49010102 Preview: Manfred Overture, Op. 115 Look How do you rate this item? Your Screen Name: (optional) This name will appear next to your review. Leave it blank if you wish to appear as "Anonymous". Review Title: Rate this product's difficulty level: Location: Email address: (optional) Used to contact you regarding your review. If you do not wish to be contacted, leave it blank. Review Guidelines Explain exactly why you liked or disliked the product. Do you like the artist? Is the transcription accurate? Is it a good teaching tool? Consider writing about your experience and musical tastes. Are you a beginner who started playing last month? Do you usually like this style of music?

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I linger yet with Nature, for the night Hath been to me a more familiar face Than that of man; and in her starry shade Of dim and solitary loveliness, I learn’d the language of another world. -Lord Byron, Manfred Demons inhabit Lord Byron’s Manfred . In the 1,336-line dramatic poem, Manfred is tormented by guilt surrounding a mysterious past transgression which resulted in the death of his beloved Astarte. Only death can relieve his suffering. Completed in 1817, the poem is infused with the themes of nineteenth century Romanticism: the supernatural, the solitary, transcendent hero. Similar themes surface in Goethe’s Faust, a work which influenced Byron. There’s also an autobiographical undercurrent to the story: Manfred was written after Byron’s marriage fell apart following accusations of his involvement in an incestuous relationship with his half sister. Byron’s dark “metaphysical drama” inspired music by Schumann and Tchaikovsky. Let’s plunge into the depths of full-blown Romanticism and listen to these two pieces: Schumann’s Manfred Overture Agitated state of mind—read Byron’s Manfred in bed—terrible night.

That’s the chilling effect Byron’s poem had on Robert Schumann in 1829. Almost twenty years later in 1848, as Schumann increasingly suffered from the inner voices of auditory hallucinations, he wrote incidental music for the poem. Manfred: Dramatic Poem with Music in Three Parts (Opus 115) was premiered at Leipzig’s Gewandhaus in 1852. Schumann told Franz Liszt, who conducted the premiere, that the work “should not be advertised as an opera, Singspiel, or melodrama, but as a ‘dramatic poem with music.’ That would be completely new and unprecedented.” The most enduring music from Schumann’s incidental music is the stormy Manfred Overture. The overture’s wild chromaticism and the occasional obsessive repetition of short phrases gives us a sense of inescapable torment until the grim, quiet finality of the final bars. There’s a brief passing moment that bears a slight, superficial resemblance to a melodic fragment in Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Here is George Szell’s classic recording with the Cleveland Orchestra: Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony began as a blueprint, similar to a treatment for a film. Mily Balakirev, the unofficial dean of the nationalist movement in Russian music, persuaded Tchaikovsky to write a programmatic four-movement work after Byron’s poem. Balakirev supplied a detailed program, as well as recommendations for key signatures, modulations, instrumentation and other elements, most of which Tchaikovsky disregarded. Tchaikovsky was deeply conflicted about the work. Shortly after its completion in 1885 he wrote, It is my opinion that my symphony will be the best of all my compositions in symphonic form… I am very proud of this work, and want those persons whose sympathy I most value in the world… to experience, when they hear it, a reverberation from the enthusiasm with which I wrote it. Later, in 1888 he expressed a desire to destroy all but the first movement and rework the symphony into something similar to the tone poem Romeo and Juliet.

But these changes were never made and the work remained in its original form: As for Manfred, without any wish to make a mere show of modesty, I would like to say that it is an abominable piece, and that I loathe it deeply, with the exception of the first movement alone. However, I should tell Your Highness that shortly, with the agreement of my publisher, I shall destroy completely the remaining three movements, which musically are very poor (the Finale is particularly loathsome), and out of a large, impossibly long symphony, I shall make a Symphonische Dichtung. Then, I am sure, my Manfred will be capable of pleasing. Indeed, it must be so: the first movement I wrote with pleasure—the remaining ones are the result of exertion, from which, I remember, I felt for some time very ill. In terms of structure, the Manfred Symphony can’t escape the influence of Berlioz. An idée fixe, first heard in the opening of the first movement, runs throughout the work. The third movement illustrates a pastoral scene, similar to the third movement of Symphonie fantastique. But the musical language is pure Tchaikovsky.

For example, listen to the swirling strings a few seconds into this passage , reminiscent of Tchaikovsky’s Dante-inspired Francesca da Rimini, Op. 32. There are echoes of Swan Lake ( this earth-shattering climax at the end of the first movement) and the yet-to-be-written Sixth Symphony. The Manfred Symphony is the epitome of program music, and that may be both its strength and weakness. The drama of Byron’s tortured poem comes to life powerfully in a way comparable to a Richard Strauss tone poem. But in the end, music must be able to stand on its own, transcending the literal and moving beyond word painting and storytelling. Try listening to the Manfred Symphony first as pure music. Enjoy the fiery excitement and unabashed Romanticism of the first movement. Shimmering Mendelssohnian sparkle gives way to this soaring melody in the second movement . The third movement evokes pastoral, folksy charm. At one moment in the final movement we find ourselves in the middle of a fugue. After listening, come back and take a look at the extensive program: I. Lento lugubure: Manfred wanders in the Alps.

Wearied by the fatal questions of existence, tormented by hopeless longings and the memory of past crimes, he suffers terrible spiritual yearnings. He has delved into the occult sciences and commands the mighty powers of darkness, but neither they nor anything in this world can give him the forgetfulness to which alone he vainly aspires. The memory of the lost Astarte, once passionately loved by him, gnaws at his heart, and there is neither limit nor end to Manfred’s despair. II. Vivace con spirit: The Alpine Fairy appears to Manfred beneath the rainbow of a waterfall. III. Andante con moto: Pastorale. A picture of the simple, free and peaceful life of the mountain folk. IV. Allegro con fuoco: The subterranean palace of Arimanes. An infernal orgy. Appearance of Manfred in the midst of a bacchanal. Evocation and appearance of the spirit of Astarte, who pardons him. Death of Manfred.

A live performance with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and conductor Constantin Silvestri: Recordings 0 About Timothy Judd A native of Upstate New York, Timothy Judd has been a member of the Richmond Symphony violin section since 2001. He is a graduate of the Eastman School of Music where he earned the degrees Bachelor of Music and Master of Music, studying with world renowned Ukrainian-American violinist Oleh Krysa. The son of public school music educators, Timothy Judd began violin lessons at the age of four through Eastman’s Community Education Division. He was a student of Anastasia Jempelis, one of the earliest champions of the Suzuki method in the United States. A passionate teacher, Mr. Judd has maintained a private violin studio in the Richmond area since 2002 and has been active coaching chamber music and numerous youth orchestra sectionals. In his free time, Timothy Judd enjoys working out with Richmond’s popular SEAL Team Physical Training program. American Symphony Orchestra — Manfred, Op. 115 (1849) Manfred, Op.

115 (1849) By Christopher Gibbs, Bard College Written for the concert The Romantic Soul: Lord Byron in Music, performed on Feb 9, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center. “In time, my endeavors in this, the dramatic field, will be accorded a just assessment.” Schumann’s prediction, unfortunately, has yet to be realized. Unlike his successor Brahms, who exalted Schumann’s Manfred (and alluded to it in his First Symphony) but who wrote no theatrical music himself, Schumann threw himself wholeheartedly into dramatic enterprises in which he could combine his musical gifts with his love of literature. In addition to many unrealized projects over the course of his career, Schumann focused late in life on a series of works that share elevated literary origins and that explore the solitary world of outcast anti-heroes, most remarkably Manfred and Faust. Within a day of completing his opera Genoveva in 1848 (a work that features another notable misanthrope in the character of Golo), Schumann began to tackle Byron’s Manfred (1817).

The composer’s interest in the poem goes back at least as far as March 1829, when its power overwhelmed him (“Agitated state of mind—read Byron’s Manfred in bed—terrible night”). In the early 1840s he made some drafts for a setting of Byron’s Corsair, but eventually abandoned the project. Manfred, by contrast, came quickly, with most of the work—a powerful overture and fifteen subsequent numbers—written in November 1848. “Never have I devoted myself to a composition with such love and energy as to Manfred,” Schumann confessed to a friend. Byron’s semi-autobiographical poem tells of Manfred’s remorse over past acts that resulted in the death of his beloved Astarte; he therefore seeks death as release from his torments. Manfred dominates the 1,336-line poem, although he encounters other characters, spirits, and, briefly, the shade of Astarte. Stubbornly unrepentant to the end, he dies rejecting salvation from any religious authority.

Schumann’s title Manfred: Dramatic Poem in Three Parts by Lord Byron with music by Robert Schumann distinguishes the work from the more conventional opera Genoveva. Schumann informed Liszt, who presented the premiere of Manfred in Weimar in June 1852, that it “should not be advertised as an opera, Singspiel, or melodrama, but as a ‘dramatic poem with music.’ That would be completely new and unprecedented.” Byron himself had viewed his text as “a kind of Poem in dialogue (in blank verse) or drama,” which was “quite impossible for the stage.” Schumann faithfully used Karl Adolf Suckow’s German translation, although he cut some 350 lines. Following the overture, considered by some commentators the composer’s finest orchestral work and the only part that remains a familiar repertory piece, comes a variety of numbers, many of them melodramas in which the characters speak over a musical accompaniment.

(Beethoven’s Fidelio and Weber’s Der Freischütz are celebrated models.) As musicologist John Daverio notes, “Schumann generally allows only the inhabitants of the spirit world to sing, while the human figures, Manfred, the Chamois Hunter, and the Abbot, are accorded melodramatic treatment.” Schumann, who does not hint at the incestuous love between Manfred and Astarte, modifies Byron’s ending in which Manfred refuses the Abbot’s blessings, and concludes with a choral invocation of the Requiem Mass, which hopefully turns from the prevailing minor mode to a calm close in E-flat major. Want 20% off tickets? Sign up for e-mails about special offers, upcoming concerts, new recordings and more, and we’ll give you 20% off your next full-price ticket order! (New email subscribers only. Not valid on subscription orders.) Subscribe To Messages From American Symphony Orchestra Please enter your email address and choose your preferred message format below, and when you are done press Subscribe.

Question: Who composed the Manfred overture?
Answer: ROBERT SCHUMANN